We are happy to announce that after scouting many wonderful places, having long discussions and many last minute changes, we finally have a location and date set for the openSUSE Conference 2012 (oSC12) and our CfP committee is ready to accept talk proposals!
location
This year oSC12 will take place at the Czech Technical University in Prague. The campus is located in the district Dejvice and is next to an underground station that gets you directly to the historic city center. The conference will start at October 20 and end on the 23th of the same month.
Read more about the location on the conference website!
Co-location and theme
This years openSUSE Conference theme is “Bootstrapping awesome!”. Why? Not just because of new new city and many new people in the organizational team. But also because we are not alone! Yes, like last year, the SUSE Labs conference will join us but there is more. This year the openSUSE conference will help ‘bootstrap’ two more conferences who share a location with us. This will be their first year, but we’re sure they will turn out to be as awesome as openSUSE Conf is and join us for a lot of fun ;-)
The other conferences are Gentoo miniconf and the LinuxDays conference.
combined conference poster (still WIP)
LinuxDays Conference
LinuxDays Conference is a community effort replacing the well known commercial LinuxExpo conference, which was big event in Czech republic with a long tradition. Unfortunatelly this event died this year as the company running it decided it was no longer worth it. A team of local people decided to pick this up and organize the LinuxDays Conference to ensure a great tradition wouldn’t get lost!
Like LinuxExpo, this event will focus on the Czech speaking Free/Libre Software community and have an emphasis on practical and relatively easy sessions in Czech. The LinuxDays Conference will happen on the weekend of October 20 and 21.
The openSUSE Conference team is extremely happy to be able to co-locate with LinuxDays! During the weekend we’ll work with them on providing beginner- and practical training sessions to the visitors. After all, our aim is to spread the use of Linux everywhere and this is a great opportunity to do so!
Check out their website!
Gentoo Mini-summit
The Gentoo Mini-Summit will be a global Gentoo gathering. Organized by a few (open)SUSE/Gentoo people in Prague, it will bring together a number of core Gentoo developers to talk about and hack on the future of this geekiest-of-the-geekiest distribution and provide a place for (to-be) users to learn and get involved – after all, a Gentoo user IS a Gentoo developer!
There is a surprisingly large overlap between openSUSE and Gentoo, with a number of prominent openSUSE people using Gentoo as well and vice-versa. Moverover, the university where we’ll have the conference is a heavy user of Gentoo, making it an even better fit. Like with LinuxDays we’ll share a number of sessions with the Gentoo crowd and of course will be on the lookout for further collaboration – as always.
Check out the Gentoo miniconf website!
Call for Papers starting
From today, the 8th of May onwards, the openSUSE Conference Call for Papers is open. This means you can send in session proposals! Go to the openSUSE Conference website and submit your papers!
What kind of proposals do we look for?
With respect to our conference theme, we would like to receive proposals for talks, workshops or BoFs which fit with ‘bootstrapping’. So if you are doing some bootstrapping of your own, representing some very young project and you are just starting, come to tell us what are you up to! Maybe we can help! Also, if you are doing something special and unique in the distribution area, be it for or within openSUSE or not – we’d love to hear about it.
But don’t worry if your talk doesn’t seem to fit this theme, you can also teach people technologies that will help them bootstrap their projects. We always look forward to decent workshops in the area of distro building, packaging and such, and due to our co-location with LinuxDays, Gentoo and SUSE Labs, there is also plenty of room for hardcore hackingsessions and more beginner oriented workshops.
If you want more details about the kind of sessions and what we expect from you as a speaker, visit our Speaker Guidelines page.
So if you’re unsure if your idea fits our conference, let us decide that for you – just send it in!
Collaboration
Each conference will have their own Call for Papers. However, the CfP teams will collaborate to ensure there is no overlap and that sessions relevant for multiple audiences are planned in the right spot. It is therefor appreciated if you properly select if your proposal also has relevance for the other communities; and what level (beginner-intermediate-expert) it has; and what languages you’d prefer to give the session in.
Also, if you’re a Gentoo developer but have something also relevant for openSUSE – we’d be happy to have your proposal. If you’re there to give a workshop to newbies about configuring their new Linux but can also talk about something much more technical – let us know.
Where and how
Just hit the button!
Registration for the conference will come soon.
For now, send us your proposals and meet us in October in Prague!
Everyone’s excited about the upcoming 
Akademy ES is the yearly meeting of KDE developers and users in Spain. It is organized by the KDE Spain Association, and started in 2008. This year the event was organized in collaboration with the 
